Horton Foote is one of America's most successful and honored dramatists for television, cinema, and the theater. He is an award-winning writer from television's Golden Age of live drama, best known perhaps for the teleplays The Trip to Bountiful (1953) and The Traveling Lady (1957) and his adaptations of William Faulkner's Old Man (1958 and 1997) and Tomorrow (1960 and the 1972 version). He is also the recipient of Academy Awards for his screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962 and Tender Mercies in 1983.

     Born in Wharton, Texas (which he immortalized as the fictional town of Harrison in his plays), Foote decided in his youth to become an actor, with his father financing his early training in Dallas and Pasadena. This onstage ambition led him to New York, where he eventually discovered that he was better suited to writing. By the time his Only the Heart reached Broadway in 1944, it was clear that his writing was much more highly regarded than his acting.

     Foote's first professionally produced play, Texas Town (1942), heralded the subject matter for all his later work (the themes of home and a sense of belonging, populated by realistic characters that are vulnerable to all sorts of human foibles). His early career in writing for the theater segued into writing for television, with dramas for such early anthology showcases as Kraft Television Theatre, Philco TV Playhouse, Playhouse 90, and U.S. Steel Hour. His teleplays include adaptations of his own stage plays and of works by southern authors, most notably William Faulkner.

     During television's formative years in the early 1950s, Foote, in the company of such outstanding writers as Paddy Chayevsky and Rod Serling, helped usher in the Golden Age of live television drama. Horton Foote's first successful teleplay was The Trip to Bountiful (for Philco TV Playhouse), a simple and touching story about an old lady who is bullied and nagged by her overbearing daughter-in-law, and who runs away for a last glimpse of her old home in the now-deserted hamlet called Bountiful. During this time Foote also enjoyed success on Broadway, with The Traveling Lady with Kim Stanley, followed by The Trip to Bountiful with Lillian Gish.

     His television work in the 1950s with producer Fred Coe (often in tandem with director Arthur Penn) illuminated and enhanced the small-screen theater strand with its emotional dramatics and its poignant tales. A Young Lady of Property (Philco) featured Kim Stanley as an adolescent girl in a Southern town whose mother is dead and whose father is about to marry again. The Oil Well (Philco), with fine performances by E.G. Marshall and Dorothy Gish, presented an atmospheric piece about a Texas farmer who believes there is oil on his property.

     Gulf Playhouse: 1st Person featured the unusual (but apt) use of a subjective camera to tell its stories from the viewpoint of a central character. Two of Foote's original teleplays were produced for this fascinating I st Person form. Death of an Old Man told a sensitive story about the man of the title (who was never seen, but his thoughts were articulated by the voice of William Hansen) who had spent his life helping others and consequently has no material wealth, lying on his deathbed worrying about the welfare of his unmarried daughter. The Tears of My Sister, with the first-person narrative provided by Kim Stanley, presented a moving drama about a young girl forced to marry a much older, and unwanted, man so that she could provide for her mother and sister. Although it was the subjective camera around which the development of the drama was structured, these I st Person teleplays were considered fine additions to Foote's television body of work. As a Variety (August 19, 1953) reviewer noted, "Foote is building up a fictional Texan world that is approaching the stature as well as volume of William Faulkner's Mississippi work."

     In 1957 Kim Stanley (a tirelessly inventive Foote interpreter) repeated her earlier Broadway role of a Texas-traveling wife whose life is being shattered by a wastrel, drunken husband reverting to type while on parole in Foote's The Traveling Lady for Studio One.

     Often compared with Faulkner as a perceptive chronicler of southern Americana, Foote is also regarded as one of Faulkner's most fluent translators, his adaptations conveying a sensitive, moving, and noble expression to the work. Foote's adaptation of Faulkner's Old Man for Playhouse 90, a powerful tale of a convict rescuing a stranded, pregnant woman during a Mississippi flood, made "a memorable 90 minutes of overwhelming drama" (Variety, November 26, I 958); for this presentation, Foote received an Emmy nomination for Best Writing of a Single Drama.

     Faulkner's warmly old-fashioned love story between a deserted pregnant wife and a hired hand in Tomorrow was adapted by Foote for another Playhouse 90 pre­sentation in 1960, and again as a screenplay for the 1972 feature Tomorrow starring Robert Duval.

     When filmed television drama superseded live, orig­inal production, Foote turned to Hollywood, where he was rewarded with an Academy Award for his elo­quent adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking­bird. But then, some two years later, when Baby the Rain Must Fall (an adaptation of his own The Traveling Lady) was released to lukewarm reviews, he started to grow somewhat disillusioned with the Holly­wood treatment of his work (particularly with the 1966 feature version of The Chase, from a screenplay adap­tation by Lillian Hellman).Foote withdrew to New Hampshire, an escape from both Broadway and Hollywood. It was during the 1970s that he created The Orphans' Home Cycle (1974-77), nine plays chronicling the life of a Texas family from 1902 to 1928, a semi autobiographical look at his family. To date, five of these nine plays have been filmed for both cinema and television. Over his long and varied career, Horton Foote has distinguished himself as a major American voice and has been honored by the Writers Guild of America, re­ceiving its 1962 award for To Kill a Mockingbird, and by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, with its 1997 Emmy Award for William Faulkner's Old Man (Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries or a Special).